Making A Cartoon Movie 10: The Joys of Digital Begging

So me and Jordan Fuller had rewritten The Hit Squad into a neat little feature length movie. We’d planned how to produce it, working out a budget for the movie. Next step: Crowdfunding.

Now, for those who don’t know, crowdfunding is asking lots of people for small amounts of money for a project. It’s also a lot more complicated than that. In theory, you put your project up on a site such as Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, set a budget you want to hit and then wait for the money to come. The reality is that asking mostly complete strangers for money is a tiring, disheartening and tedious process. A lot of people have been on the other end of crowdfunding, being asked for money for someone’s dog’s friends world cruise or Auntie Jane’s Toffee Supermarket. It’s annoying to be asked for money, it’s horrible to ask for it too.

Roddy from The Hit Squad circa 2012

Before we started, we approached a very (in)famous celebrity who’d agreed to be in the movie at a price. We decided that once we’d hit that pricepoint in crowdfunding, we could announce the celebrity and we’d blow through our budget. We couldn’t even raise the £20,000 (*gulp*) for the celebrity, let alone the money for us to be able to produce the movie. We restructured our awful budgeting and reassessed the minimum we needed to make the movie and I started spending my entire time on social networks speaking to people about The Hit Squad. I woke at 7am and slept at 3am, speaking to people on every single timezone possible.

The most surprising thing happened, I actually made a whole bunch of really good friends. Friends I still have to this day. Now, not to go all every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining on you, but looking back, I wish I’d realized what was happening so that I could’ve just enjoyed it.

Did we hit our budget? Find out next week in the post: What To Do When You Horrifically Fail Crowdfunding